Bukowski Never Did This

Charles Bukowski hated to do readings.

He would get drunk.

He would puke, before a reading. Like Bill Russell puking before a basketball game. It was just nerves. If you don't have stage fright you're not going to do your best.

He never puked during a reading.

One time Potter and Suzette invited a girl who wanted to be a poet over to their house to meet me. I was supposed to read some poems for them.

I got drunk.

When the time came to read my poems I started out okay, but then I went into a coughing jag, puked, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, and continued reading, as if nothing had happened.

A total professional.

The girl was impressed.

This was what you had to do to be a poet.

But that's not what I mean when I say Bukowski Never Did This.

Bukowski Never Did This is a play on Bukowski's Shakespeare Never Did This, where Bukowski toured Europe, with a paparazzo, Michael Montfort, read to huge crowds, got drunk on French television, showed his ass.

When Bukowski was working at the post office, about to be fired for excessive absenteeism--actually, for writing about working at the post office, in Open City and the L. A. Free Press (he called Open City Open Pussy)--John Martin, Black Sparrow Press, gave him an allowance to quit his job, stay at home, and write Post Office.

Now, anybody can write a book if he has (1) money to live on, while he writes it, and (2) a publisher to send it to, when he finishes writing it-a publisher who will publish it, keep it in print, and have it translated, so it will sell overseas, and he will be a world writer, and come into America through the back door, as Bukowski did.

I would write a book about the post office while working at the post office. With no publisher to send it to, when I finished writing it.

Indeed, if it got out what I was up to I would lose my job at the post office.

So I had to sneak, to do it.

I wasn't working at the post office, I was working as a grant writer at a community behavioral health care center. I had an office with a small, desktop computer hooked up to a common laser printer shared by all the professionals in my building. There was also a common copying machine, for shared use.

I had someone I reported to, but she didn't try to micromanage my time. As long as I got my grant applications in on time, and we got awarded grants, she didn't care how I did it, or where I did it. I worked several days a week from home.

She treated me as a professional, a salaried employee, who could manage his own time, and could be trusted to give the company a day's work for a day's pay.

Do you know the acronym GEFWIF. G. E. F. W. I. F.

Good enough for who it's for.

I gave them what I thought they deserved, based on how they treated me.

They were paying me half what I made when I worked in Atlanta, before I was downsized, unemployed for a year and a half, and had to move. Had to sell my $120,000 house in Atlanta and move into a $36,000 house Brenda and I were buying from her brothers and her sister in Parker, Florida--her old home place.

And, while my boss treated me as a pro, and tried to shield me from the front office, the front office was chickenshit, and thought they could get more work out of me by riding my ass about the quantity, and quality, of my output.

They wanted more. Faster, better, cheaper. But they didn't want to pay for it. They wanted me to do it because I had to. To do it or else.

I had to either do things their way or sell a book.

Rescue myself by selling a book.

I had just finished writing a book. SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL. My 250th book.

Without selling a word to New York or Hollywood, winning a grant or a literary prize, a writer-in-residence position or an invitation to a writers colony.

The day I finished writing it, LitVision Press, a member of the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA), issued a call for manuscripts. They had decided to publish a novel.

I sent Pat Simonelli a copy of SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

What to write next?

What do you write after you write 250 books, without selling a word to New York?

I decided to write a book about working for a living, a book like Post Office, only I would write it while still working full-time, as a grant writer.

It would start when I went back to work, after my 18 months of unemployment, following the lay-off in Atlanta. I got a job in Panama City--Parker is a suburb of Panama City--as a technical writer, writing a digitized technical manual on CD-ROM, with hypertext links to callouts on illustrations for a machine that rewound cable used to tow mine countermeasures equipment.

I got laid off from that job, after only five months. I had thought the job was permanent. I didn't know whether it was my fault, their fault, or an act of God neither of us could prevent: we were overtaken by events (OBE).

But after only a month at the house I got another job, the grant-writing job, and I was doing better, at it.

The book would end with my six-month performance appraisal, where I had written a dozen grant applications, some of them still pending, some of them won.

I had made it six months in my new job, had rallied from being fired for blogging, if that's what happened at my first job, had proven myself.

So the book had a happy ending.

In the book, I alternated chapters, between Diary and Novel.

I was the narrator of the diary, which was written in the first person.

The hero of the novel was Art "Home" Brew, b. r. e. w., compare art brut, b. r. u. t.

Art Brew was my doppelgänger.

I had been writing novels about Art Brew for five years or more.

There are now more than 75 novels about Art Brew on the worldwide web, at my web page, The Daily Bulletin.

(Disregard. I took The Daily Bugle and roman-feuilleton.com down. So there are only 35 Art Brew novels on the web. But the other 40 books were up there, once.)

Morevoer, I had been writing books in which the first person and the third person changed, the present tense and the past tense changed, within the book.

So you wouldn't call Bukowski Never Did This experimental. It was more "fleshing out the paradigm."

Anyhow, I posted Bukowski Never Did This, online, daily, as I wrote it, and Pat Simonelli, while he was reading and considering SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL, was reading, and considering, Bukowski Never Did This, and he decided he'd rather publish Bukowski Never Did This than SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

He asked me if he could and I said that was okay.

One time a co-worker quit to take another job, I was promoted, the man asked for his old job back, and I was let go.

This happened to me twice.

Looking back, I see that what happened with SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL and Bukowski Never Did This happened to me twice, too.

I wrote a book called MIGHTY BOOK, about working at IBM, and sent t to Crowbar, Popular Reality, and he agreed to publish it.

Then I sent him a courtesy copy of Forty, in manuscript, which had blurbs in it, because he had written a blurb for Evil Genius, or Open Book, and he said he'd rather publish Forty than MIGHTY BOOK.

So I let him.

Now, Forty was the last book-length book I had published, until Bukowski Never Did This.

That was in 1988.

17 years ago.

Over 200 books ago. Forty was my 40th book.

Keep writing.

Be patient.

Don't get excited.

The important thing is not to get excited.

You might puke.

Forty sank without a trace.

Just as Screed, Common Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter, Lost Writings, Evil Genius, and Open Book sank.

Will the same fate lie in store for Bukowski Never Did This?

Or will its publication be like the readings at the Six Gallery in San Francisco when Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was first read, or the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, around which a literary movement, opposed to the mainstream establishment, coalesced?

Are there enough people out there pissed-off at what they're being offered by New York, and hungry for something different, more authentic, and more in touch with the reality they experience, in their workaday lives, to make a difference, bring about change, overturn the applecart?

Time will tell.